I often try to tell peo­ple that Google is not pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion retrieval algo­rithms, it’s pro­vid­ing adver­tis­ing algo­rithms. And that is a very impor­tant dis­tinc­tion when we think about what kind of infor­ma­tion is avail­able in these corporate‐controlled spaces.

When we think about net­work graphs and we talk about how the net­work effects that make up an impor­tant part of how social move­ments and how infor­ma­tion is dis­trib­uted online, there’s this assump­tion in those visu­al­iza­tions that every node in that net­work is equal. But very often, and you can slice data in many dif­fer­ent way, the lan­guages that we speak actu­al­ly lim­it the net­works that we have access to and that we’re inter­act­ing with.

What I’m argu­ing pri­mar­i­ly today is that focus­ing on ped­a­gogy is a key aspect of social jus­tice work, and that teach­ing crit­i­cal data lit­er­a­cy along with oth­er dig­i­tal lit­er­a­cy skills is a key part of what we need to do.

I think that we need a rad­i­cal design change. And I might ask if I were teach­ing an HCI class or design class with you, I would say, ​“How are you going to design this so that not one life is lost?” What if that were the design imper­a­tive rather than what’s your IPO going to be?